Canada federal election Sept. 21

CBC News will bring you the latest news from the campaign trail in our live blog every weekday from now until election day, Oct. 19.

Yasmeen Ibrahim, a 20-year-old volunteer with the Conservative Party, says the party is not racist, everyone is entitled to their own opinion and women should be able to wear a niqab at citizenship ceremonies.

The media asked Justin Trudeau earlier today whether there was flexibility on the size of the deficits it is promising in the first three years of a Liberal mandate.

Liberal press secretary Zita Astravas sent an email just now pointing to a previous Liberal backgrounder that says:

With our historic plan for investment, the federal government will have a modest short-term deficit of less than $10 billion in each of the next two fiscal years – less than half the average Harper deficit of over $20 billion per year. If the fiscal situation deteriorates due to a further slowdown of the economy in the weeks ahead, Liberals will be honest with Canadians about the facts. After the next two fiscal years, the deficit will decline and our investment plan will return Canada to a balanced budget in 2019. Combining fiscal discipline with invest-ments in economic growth, we will end the Harper legacy of chronic deficits and reduce Canada’s federal debt-to-GDP ratio each year.

Stephen Harper is "playing a very divisive game" with his government's effort to impose a ban on niqabs during the citizenship oath, NDP Leader Tom Mulcair said Monday, just days before a French-language debate in Quebec — a province in which identity politics continues to drive a wedge between voters.

Green Leader Elizabeth May should be allowed to participate in the Munk debate later this month, her Liberal rival said Monday, as she tried a last-ditch effort to get into the discussion on foreign policy.

The Greens have filed a complaint with the Canada Revenue Agency alleging the Munk debate format violates the agency's policies that limit the political activities of charities.

The Aurea Foundation, a registered charity with the CRA, is helping fund the debate.

"I'm going to let the lawyers hash out the details of this one, but I will say that I was disappointed," Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau said in Toronto.

"She should be in the Munk debate because we know of all the different international issues facing Canada and the world, climate change is possibly, certainly one of the very top ones when we lookat the future that we're building for our kids and our grandkids."

Newly released research on Quebec's low-cost child-care system suggests children who go through it may do well academically, but have worse outcomes when it comes to health, life satisfaction and crime rates.

In a paper released Monday, a group of university researchers say that children exposed to the province's child-care system were more likely to have higher crime rates, worse health and lower levels of life satisfaction as they have aged than their counterparts in other provinces who didn't have access to the same type of system.

The new research is likely throw a political wrench into the federal election, where the New Democrats have made bringing Quebec-style child care to the rest of the country a key plank intheir platform.

The party's plan is to spend $5 billion a year after an eight-year phase-in to pay for a million existing and new child-care spaces that cost parents no more than $15 a day. NDP Leader Tom Mulcair repeatedly says his party's plan would create quality, affordable child-care spaces in each province.

The working paper by three university researchers, however, questions whether such a universal system -- accessible to all income levels -- can deliver on that promise of quality.

The Quebec system is the largest program of its kind in North America. The province spends about $2.2 billion a year to support the system, which costs parents up to $20 a day.

There has been no question about its financial benefits to Quebec in the short-term. Research from economist Pierre Fortin from the University of Quebec at Montreal has shown the program helped grow the provincial economy, increased women's workforce participation and employment rates, and boosted income tax and consumption tax revenues flowing to provincial and federal coffers. Work by Fortin and others suggests government recoups between $1.50 and $3 for every dollar invested in child care in Quebec.

But there have been lingering questions about program quality.

In their paper made public Monday, Kevin Milligan from the University of British Columbia, Michael Baker from the University of Toronto, and Jonathan Gruber from MIT in Cambridge, Mass., updatework from 2008 to see if children in the Quebec care system kicked their troubling behaviours over time.

What the trio found instead was "striking evidence" that exposure to the program was associated with higher crime rates, with the effects most acutely seen in boys. Boys were more likely to havehigher levels of hyperactivity and aggression, the researchers wrote, while girls showed declines in prosocial behaviour, which captures many altruistic activities like donating and volunteering.

The Conservative party's about-face on the Syrian refugee crisis may not be enough to ease the minds of Christian voters disenchanted with the government's erstwhile reluctance tomake Canada more welcoming to people in need.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's oft-repeated pledge to allow 10,000 refugees into the country over four years did not always sit right with voters stereotypically believed to be at the core of his support base.

Saturday's announcement that regulations would be relaxed in a bid to allow thousands of refugees into Canada by the end of the year appeared to do little to ease their concerns.

Ryan Dueck, pastor of a Mennonite church in Lethbridge, Alta., believes many will feel the gesture offers too little too late. He noted that Immigration Minister Chris Alexander continued to place security concerns ahead of humanitarian ones, prompting him to view the mid-campaign pledge with a degree of skepticism.

"Nobody's saying that we just uncritically fling the doors open, at least not to my knowledge, [but] I wonder if his articulation of this as a 'top priority' might prove to be a way of giving the Conservative government a bit of room to manoeuvre once the election campaign has come and gone," Dueck said.

"I don't know this for sure, of course ... I'm just thinking that given the party's history of prioritizing security and using this as a reason for not moving more quickly, I wouldn't be shocked to see 'prioritizing' of security show up down the road as a reason for why the refugee situation hasn't improved as quickly as Canadians hoped it might."